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The titular call rings out at the very beginning and very end, thus the financial rise and emotional fall of a Wisconsin magnate. The brawling lumberjack (Edward Arnold) razes the land, dreams of power, marries into an empire. Men greet men with a holler and a mount, with women it's a more complex shell game, it involves spiked drinks and hurled metal trays. Frances Farmer as the hardened beer-hall tart ("What are ya, missionaries?") is beguilingly stylized, with provocative slouch, slanted mouth and proto-Bacall throat—singing "Aura Lee" under a parasol, she gets the close-up she deserves. Love blossoms but business comes first, he weds the boss' daughter (Mary Nash) while she settles for the Swedish pal (Walter Brennan). "Now boys, don't start something you can't finish." Middle-age slows down the rolling boulder, the lumber baron visits his widowed friend and a reverse tracking shot and a lap dissolve give the introduction of the daughter (Farmer also) as a memory or a ghost made flesh. (Two decades ahead of Vertigo, a man twice losing his beloved.) Edna Ferber's rugged and genteel generations, a hale Howard Hawks saga with a grudging William Wyler denouement. Two-thirds of it anticipate bits from To Have and Have Not and Red River, while the later sequences (despite the occasional Hawksian gag, like Farmer and Joel McCrea falling for each other while stretching and folding taffy) are dominated by the fancy-gazebo style of The Little Foxes. Despite Samuel Goldwyn's pride in homogenizing distinct artists, the elements here remains strikingly divergent: Indeed, the combination of formalist saloon jaunt, documentary (i.e., Richard Rosson's logging industry mini-movie) and stiff soap-opera hews closer to the Straub-Huillet of The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp than to Cimarron. With Mady Christians, Andrea Leeds, Frank Shields, Edwin Maxwell, and Cecil Cunningham. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |